April 2013

April 27, 2013

I have begun something of a stupid quest, because in fact I'm done with questing. I have all of the answers to big questions that my life requires and I am settling down to being practical. Nevertheless the habit of reading for the sake of enlightenment dies hard, and in between the epic video games and the occasional universal series, there ain't nothing else out there.

I never had much of a predilection for Kafka whom I generally associate with Camus, Sylvia Plath and William Burroughs. He always represented to me a kind of lunch lady serving hunking dollops of self-pity lit for the appetites of Slackers and Schleprocks. So there was never any incentive for me to actually get into his sort of genius. Now I think I'll have to, having read The Castle.

The story drew me in immediately and now having finished it I have noticed in its first person narrative a kind of strength of character I seldom notice around contemporary individuals. The sort of self-possession K. exhibits while endlessly frustrated among the peasants and commoners all striving to be part of the obiter dicta of functionary hierarchs is remarkable. Even more so when you recognize how much he must condescend; he is barely above freezing and starving. He commits to associations and relationships out of that necessity and that is all he can do.

I am impressed with the possibility that The Castle is an unfinished book. One can imagine that its lack of completion is prescient - that this is and remains the condition of the modern Western man and that there is no resolution to the problem of the meaningless ascent into the Castle -- that there is no Lord and the functionaries function around a void.

Well, that's all I have. More on the first person after I finish Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun and Roger Zelasney's Amber Series.

April 22, 2013

There is something retro deep inside me, and I think in all of us, when it comes to dealing with alienation of modern, global life. I think the proper thing to do is to work your way through modern, global life and supplant its alienation with a whiff of the tribal and a considered portion of the guild. You know the guild, the moose lodge, the order of buffalo, the brotherhood of the otter - something like Fred Flintstone had. You see, George Jetson had no running buddies.

I am reading Gene Wolfe's tales in the Book of the New Sun.

What impresses me now the second time around literarily, since Stephenson's OMVI, is the concept of a small group of men who are self-sustaining in their ways. They could be monks in their monastary, perhaps a royal family in their castle, maybe a group of makers in their hackerspace. Organized around an arcane competence. Prepared to initiate noobs into apprenticeship and grow them into journeymen. Dedicated to sentence fragments with implicit subjects, but descriptive nonetheless.

From Wolfe comes the Seekers of Truth and Penitence. Aah but maybe it's just little old me finally tasting a good portion of sword and sorcery. As I've read on, I can see how this story goes down the tunnel of a single quest and how different it is from more of what I'd call an 'open world / sandbox' adventure, of which Iain Banks is the master. And I've also gotten most of the way through Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber, and see some of the same interesting, but limiting first person-ality.

This morning I heard the first whiff of the conspiracy theory behind some elaborate and scary intra-agency rivalries that verge on warfare. According to this particular Lt. Colonel, there are some sneaky agencies that run training operations in public and have patsies in place just in case something goes wrong. But I will deal with that at length on its own because that subject would overwhelm this, which is simply the following.

Since 9/11, I sorta kinda predicted then end of the nation state. Of course I don't know what I'm talking about, because some time later, Colin Powell convinced me that state sovereignty is too powerful for anyone to let go. So state sponsored terrorism remains to me, an evil to be taken quite seriously, and more seriously than any other kind. But that doesn't change the fact that many states have many elements with many agendas, many of which come into and out of power. Today's African National Congress is in much better shape than yesterday's. Today's KKK is pathetic. Today's OWS gets no news. So the nation state continues, but watch for the movements below that level.

Here in the US, we've gone diversity happy. I am convinced that just about anyone who flies diversity flags is eating their own dog food, much of which they didn't grow themselves. Which is to say that out of 1000 diversity programs, 990 are funded by non-diverse sources. In other words, we have a lot of cliques on the inside that aren't really on the inside. A lot of guilds have politicked their way into permanence, but a dependent permanence. Kind of like the class of people with driver's licenses and gas station credit cards as compared to auto mechanics and petroleum engineers. As long as there are auto mechanics and petroleum engineers willing to work for the public, driver's licenses and gast station credit cards are meanningful, but the guild of diversity is like the guild of driver's license holders. You can call it important. That doesn't make it important.

So all of this depends upon how well the rule of law and open society functions, leveraging the standing of the American general public. But at some point, I have decided to prepare myself for what might come next, which is the degredation of all that. How shall I say it? When it's time to cross the desert, the entire value of your cool low rider is nullified. Time to buy a Jeep.

So I'm interested in, as I said, my own martial education - but in the context of a reasonable guild. Not survivalists, but people whose value transcends the relative luxuries our open society provide today, but are not promised for tomorrow. That means that I need to make real tribal links.

April 19, 2013

Imagine that you were introduced to basketball by Michael Jordan. He teaches you how to dribble, to shoot, to block, to assist. You get pretty good. And then he starts playing. Every day you are playing against Michael Jordan; every day you are losing. After a while, the sport would cease to be appealing to you, unless you were Clyde Drexler or Dominique Wilkins.

My observation of meritocracy is that it must be tyrannical. There are technical, political and aesthetic tyrannies at work at the core of any contest. Sometimes we made our decision about sport vs activity based upon whether the score was determined by judges. Ice dancing, springboard diving, skateboard vert ramp. All of these require judges rather than timers or other measuring devices. But a winner must be determined no matter what. If it's not, then a game isn't fair. Fairness seems rather odd in this respect - if everybody plays by the same rules, you always produce proper winners and proper losers. We seem to forget that this is what fairness demands. Fairness demands that you create losers. Somehow we've perverted sportsmanship. It's true that it's not whether you win or lose but how you play the game. Right. If you play fair and lose, then it's a good game. But if you play so that there are no winners and no losers then you have destroyed the rules, and thus the meaning of sportsmanship and the integrity of the idea of fairness. Meritocracy is hardball. Rules are tyrannical. All of that is fair.

We all used to play a game of 'sport vs activity' which generally focused on the courtly games vs the roughneck games. Is golfing a sport? What about skiing? Well, not like football or boxing. As it turns out, every sport, every competitive activity has its requirements most of which at the pro level are far beyond us. I don't know about you, but I'm never going to dunk on Akeem. I'm never going to hit a 90mph fastball. I'm never going to pass a stock car on the high side at 190mph. I'm never going to drive a golf ball 350 yards. I'm never going to surf Mavericks. And yet these are the things the best of us do every day. Nevertheless, I should be able to enjoy auto racing, baseball, surfing and basketball not only as a spectator, but as a participant. I don't want to play one on one against Jordan, but what about fairness? A level playing field is a killing field. That's why we have leagues.

--

Here in America, we tend to be bastards. My definition of a bastard combines facts and observables. A bastard is always a heartless bastard and exerts his cruelty upon others because of the cruelty at the heart of his very existence. He was not loved by the man who made him. So bastards are unforgiving when it comes to the rules - they expect none and give no love or quarter. A gentleman may have his honor and with honor comes grace which is taken and given. Why should honor be sacrificed for a lack of excellence? A forgiving and gentlemanly father understands this, but such is the understanding only rarely received by bastards. So bastards stand as border guards, bayonets at the ready, following the only orders they get, surviving on the thin gruel of regulatory compliance.

I shouldn't say that we tend to be bastards, rather that our promise of meritocracy gives fine comfort to those who would be bastards. Here in the States, we don't go in for hereditary titles and the other trappings of royalty, peerage and primogeniture. We prefer SAT results, Body Mass Indices and FICO scores. We make sport scoreboards of our humanity, often to our detriment. But how can we avoid a discussion about who was the best rock guitarist of all time, or the top five romantic comedies or Mopar vs Ford vs GM? We cannot, because the bastards among us will not let us have history settled. America is the land that killed the gentleman's 'C'.

We may come to regret that, yeilding as we do all sorts of credits to all sorts of characters, ungentlemanly as they may be. You see in order to create the illusion that we are personally and institutionally in service to the ideal of equality, we must assert a 'level playing field'. It doesn't bother me much that I cannot hang with Michael Jordan, but I feel as though I am often surrounded by those who are bound and determined to level things out. To have he and I play by the same rules on the same court and call that equality is only something a heartless bastard would ask. It is quite enough for any sort of meritocracy I would respect that I can see and be inspired by Jordan, and play equitably amongst my peers, in my class, in my league, in my own neighborhood.

So who is really a bastard? The one who says we all must play on one playing field without any regard to our actual abilities. The one who won't let us group up into leagues. The one who, in service to the unreal ideal of a level playing field for everyone, makes the boys play against the girls, the rich play against the poor, the strong play against the weak, the young against the old, all without regard to their actual ability. The right way to do have fairness and meritocracy is to have a hierarchy of leagues and an open, unlimited class.

Sports people knew I was coming to this. America loves sports because we get to participate. We get to watch Tiger Woods; we watched him climb the leagues. We have leagues and classes and invitationals and opens and tournaments and qualifiers so that the tyranny of rules can apply where we can apply ourselves among our peers.

--

There's something I have called the LogarithmicShadow. I have described it all kinds of ways. In one way I've described it in Cobb's Rule #7: Never trust a man whose shoes cost more than you're whole day's pay. The Logarithmic Shadow is how I describe how the poor survive at all given the power of the rich. Most of us don't know Michael Jordan. Most of us are even incompetent to be a high school basketball coach. So what keeps Jordan from messing all over our neighborhood basketball games? What keeps the CIA from bugging your PTA? What keeps Special Forces snipers from shooting schoolyard bullies? It's the same thing that keeps you standing outside of the club where Lady Gaga is hanging out tonight. It's the same thing that keeps you stuck in traffic on the freeway.

The big dogs have bigger fish to fry, and you ain't one of them. Be grateful.

So I will describe the Logarithmic Shadow as the respect for leagues, boundaries and capabilities. It's NOT fair if we all play on the same turf. That's a class violation, and class violations are what makes the small tyrannies of rulesets into big tyrannies of societies. See you didn't like me saying meritocracy is tyrannical did you? OK. The proper American meritocracy implicitly means multiple levels and hierarchy. We mean climbing the social ladder. We mean, if we're serious, we mean superior and inferior. We mean winners and losers. We mean brackets and championships. We mean win, place, show and also ran. We mean fair competition, not a free-for-all.

---

Now that we have that understanding, I'm going to point out some things I don't like which are consequential.

I don't like a President who doesn't act Presidential.That means a President who hogs the spotlight and doesn't delegate authority is the man whose shoes cost more than your day's pay. When he's the big dog paying attention small fry that means three things. One. He's going to win with overwhelming force 95% of the time. Two. The bigger fish are getting away. Three. The 5% of the time he loses to the small fry, degrades the office. Stay in your lane.

I don't like all this rabble about 'income inequality'.If you can walk all day barefoot, then that's your advantage over the man who can't. Ask the Viet Cong. If you can live without eating steak and lobster, without manicures and tummy tucks, without air conditioning and power windows, good! He who lives without luxury will not be a slave to fashion. But the girl who wears fake Prada sunglasses is both self-delusional and a fraud. The man who cannot save $100,000 cannot save the planet. Stay in your lane, people.

April 17, 2013

I've been thinking about the power of prayer along with the power of Facebook likes. I would guess that they are about equal in sentimental value.

When something bad happens, people need to be fixed. As readers of Cobb know, I deal with recompense in two dimensions, healing and curing. Is there anyone who beleives that prayers are for curing? Perhaps, but let us presuppose that they are a minority and what is desired in the acceptance of prayers is the sentiment of healing. But let's take this one step further and particular.

What if the person offering healing actually has a cure? What then is the value of their prayers and apologies and sentiments? What if your banker decides to foreclose on your property and then offers you a sympathy card? What if someone who could repair your wallet only decides to feel your pain? You get the picture.

This is why I have increasingly short patience with the sentiments of powerful people.

April 16, 2013

Most of my life, people have addressed me with respect. I'm starting to realize something - or maybe I should say I stumbled upon a realization which is both enlightening and a little sad. I am that man.

It has always annoyed me when people I considered affluent and silly have demurred from being called 'Mr. Smith'. Oh please call me John, my dad is Mr. Smith. It betrays a false sense of humility - I don't quite understand what causes it but I have my theory. My theory is that they are connected, privileged and untalented & unserious. Informality is all the formality they can afford. They are the people who go everywhere and do nothing. They have an embarassment of riches - they are the owners of small fortunes, large houses and unpaid loans to wealthy in-laws. They smile a lot.

My daughter observed that we live in a very nice neighborhood where the rich people don't act rich. Yes, we have some of those good neighbors. We live in a place where reasonably rich people can live normal lives; I'm attracted to such neighborhoods. But occasionally we pay the social price in the company of boys who inherit and don't grow up.

Myself. I'm like a cousin to Robert Schimmel. Son of the Holocaust survivor. When things go bad, that's when I get funny. But most of the time, I'm serious, and for most of my life, I have preferred to be called Mr. Bowen. Yes, that's my father's name, and his father's before him and his father's before him.

---

A couple weekends ago, I found myself in Carmel. Carmel is a town where rich people come to act rich, especially if there's an event at Pebble Beach. You can tell by the little logos. That one says US Open. That one says America's Cup. Here's a man wearing tortoiseshell glasses driving a fully restored cream and brown Citroen 2CV Charleston. Here's a man discussing the finer points of a $300 fountain pen. These kids are from Tokyo. I happen to think rich people are interesting in their element. Here's a tall fellow who exclaimed that he went through a cowboy hat phase and he and his brother have one of every sort. Shopping in Carmel is not enlightening, but like shopping everywhere, it's always fun to see people get gratification.

I have expensive taste. I like things that do what they are supposed to do, for a long time, and are designed be repaired by engineers who expect they are used properly. Occasionally, I admire very well engineered things that are superficially functional and exquisitely beautiful. So I priced some Damascus steel folding knives at the cowboy hat store, but I don't have 3500 bucks to spare. I tooke th brochure anyway. I too am going through a cowboy phase, only I don't have easy access to capital. Still, because of my tastes, places like Carmel are not totally foreign to me, I appreciate restored old cars as much as anyone - I am generous with knowing nods for all gearheads.

As the Spousal Unit and the First Daughter were finding the discount arcade, I ambled purposelessly along the boulevard overhearing resort namedropping conversations in French, Japanese, Catalan and Connecticut Yankee. Most of it was the informed burble of Victorians and their best servants, updated to California Casual. One has to admire the spunk of men who would study golf, or hotel science so deeply and wear their khaki slacks, blue blazers and rep ties with such smug confidence all the while knowing the are lackies at the highest level. One hopes they are not abused. The stunning soundbite I caught amongst all of the street chat was:

"Well you have to treat everyone with respect because you never know."

It hit me almost at once that I was in America. The America I remember from before 9/11 when I used to think about the wonderment of fancy restaurants. In any fancy American restaurant, the guy two tables away from you just might be a multimillionaire. Of course that truth remained after 9/11 but we started getting all dysfunctional about what America meant. I'm talking about the open society that we still are. Free parking on the street in Carmel.

One of the things I remember most about that book I read about the rich, the wealthy and the super wealthy was that a lot of the wealthy are pretty peculiar folks, meaning that they are the guy who spent 20 years perfecting goat cheese, or ball bearings. If you were the guy who invented the Maglite, you started off with a dream to have a really good flashlight and then one day everybody in law enforcement wanted one. Four years later, you're a regular old guy with time and millions to burn in Carmel. You go to all the Red Sox games. You buy the wife a new Benz. Yeah the watch costs 6 thousand, but whatever. You just buy stuff that works, not all that flash. You can find things out if you really want to know. You have time. You have money. You have patience. You're not under pressure to make a whole lot of mistakes. You appreciate a good meal. You realize you have been blessed, and you take your freedom seriously. By my reckoning, a reasonable man, once rich, will get over the hump and mellow out or wreck his life within 5 years.

Obviously there are a lot of factors. But people have always called me 'sir', and aside from some testy Koreans back in 1990, I can't think of anyone who has ever pestered me out of their store. Although, I do get the itch in some of those men's departments in NYC on 5th Ave. So it occurred to me that outside of the actual buying, bossing people around and ordering things done, people are starting to treat me like I might be something of a wealthy patron. I don't generally ask stupid questions. I'm not in a rush. I've got my inner peace, and I take my freedom seriously.

---

Today I realize that I am visibly older and chilled out. When I dress, I can no longer do the casual abandon. I have been working at home for 2 and a half years. Going out is always going out. And I'm noticing that I'm they guy who is often mistaken for a civilized individual. In other words, people treat me like I'm rich. And I am. In any context in the world I'm doing just great. The only thing I need is to replace what I already have that breaks. That and get my kids through college. But I got them through highschool and it went, more or less, according to plan - here in the most expensive neighborhood in the world.

I am Mr. Bowen. I only have regular American upper middle class standing, which is very often very tenuous, but I'm accustomed to dealing with the headaches. I've paid the taxes. I've paid the attorneys, almost. I've paid the dues. I haven't been worn out or defeated, and I'm not pretending that I'm going to take over the .. whatever or save the planet. But I'm someone you can look up to if you are young, and I'm not going to pretend that life hasn't taught me some serious lessons. I've got the deadpan humor to prove it. I know what to say when people die. I know how to react when shit hits the fan. I know when I need help and I know when I can be helpful. I know my dependents and my dependencies.

It never gets old. Facing life never ceases to be scary. I may be getting to that point at which I become like the old soldier who hasn't died yet. Like the gambler who makes a killing cheating, gets caught and knows how to shut up and give the money back. I understand the role of chance, and I know not to ever depend on it but capture it when it comes.

April 07, 2013

It has been a rather extraordinary year so far. I like the way it's heading.

I realize that I am not foolish and that if I only maintain an even keel, I may very well move ahead, but sometimes I sail into rough waters. That's where I am right now, but there's light in the distance.

The Age of SailI have replaced my science fiction with a somewhat new genre of reading which is making me an interesting person. They are personal stories, fictions all, of character. And I am investing more and more time into embodying into myself a bit more - how shall we say - perhaps a bit more Griffindor. Some bravery, some presence. In my work, I am getting more aligned with the technologies that are most likely to make us money and gaining confidence. Some great fraction of this I am attributing to my reading of the Aubrey Maturin series which twist my Anglophilia towards the inevitability of my Anglo American cultural heritage. At some point I'll need to recover some French, but these days I am feeling how much my sense of propriety is Western in those traditions. I see direct parallels in the organization of the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars and the software industry - don't ask me how, it's complex, but I'm seeing it nonetheless. Sometimes one can do a great deal with a Brig. And certainly I see how Aurbrey's fortunes and misfortunes mirror my own. All one can do is sail. Sail against all odds and maintain your ship. Arcane and forgotten, we will all be, but for today there remain prizes at sea.

EDC & The Grey SheepdogsIf my son didn't bust his budget, I would probably own a rifle now. As it stands I have only gotten my pockets a bit more emptied of cash and filled with survival gadgets. Knives, tools & lights. A quarter of watching videos about hunting, shooting, sniping, hand loading and many other gun oriented immersions have given me a stirling education about what's out there to know and what I actually want to know. As an extension of my go-bag paranoia I have come full face with what lethality I feel comfortable with and what the Sheepdog Class generally talks about. Of course I harken back to Bill Whittle's revolutionary rant and the consequences of what the more vocal Right has been yammering about for the past several years. On the whole, it feels a little like parenthood. I have this instinctual aversion to the hard work of going Grey which I can already tell will be overcome by my unwillingness to be irresponsible. I hope that I'll fall into it naturally. But I suspect it will all be some kind of inevitable accident, like parenthood.

In fact, I'm seriously downgrading my gaming, going bigger on the exercise and Tai Chi towards Aikido and some Kendo equivalent. Writing is not so important as doing things outdoors, and the indoor stuff is more about my regular work than some ineffables for my personality. So like I said, all is moving along positively.

The problem is simply this. I need to find a way to get more money. And that means I have to get aggressive and make a plan. I've been sitting on my cool surfboard waiting for the big wave. It's time to put a motor on it and cover more ocean.

The Royal FamilyI am coming to some harsh conclusions about my Family First attitude, and I'll be putting them to the test over the next few years. But it's starting to feel like I'm losing a great deal of trust in public institutions, and that very much means public corporations. I'm starting to feel very proprietary. I don't have words for it this minute but it rather goes back to a sense I have about the inevitability of war, of nepotism, of irresponsible classes and of the consequences of meritocracy in a libertine society. The preliminary conclusion is that the people who are best off in the world are those who are the masters of guilds and patriarchies. Is that exactly fuedal? Not sure, but it sure ain't public and it ain't democratic. The masses are a force of nature. (New Cobb rule, that).

Tonight I watched a repeat of two hours of HD colorized video of WW2. What struck me was how many Frenchmen were turned in a matter of months into refugees in their own country. I know how relatively easily that could happen in Los Angeles, and how very difficult it would be in more rugged, remote country where civilians already knew how to shoot rifles.

April 04, 2013

As readers of Cobb know, I swore several years ago that I will not spend another dime on movies with posters of a man with a gun and a woman wrapped around his leg. Unfortunately, they don't do movie posters any longer, so it's harder for me to judge. And, quite frankly, I enjoy movies with heroes. Movies need to have heroes and we would be a poorer society without such heroic narratives upgraded with car chases, defenestrations, explosions and machine gun fire. Why? Well, imagine what kind of place this would be if a Saturday night date consisted of vegetarian dinners and movies by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The suicide rate would triple. Hell, we'd be Greenland.

But the point is that I cannot resist heavy reading, at least in literature. So I have taken it upon myself to shoulder the burden of W. H. Auden's syllabus which had been making the rounds of the Chatting Class & Cool Kids recently. In fact, I've already eaten my first slice of that hearty bread in Kafka's 'The Castle'. Strangely nourishing - review soon to come. Here's the rest of the meal:

Dante - The Divine Comedy

Aeshylus - The Agamemnon

Sophcles - Antigone

Horace - Odes (Loeb)

Augustine - Confessions (Loeb)

Shakespeare - Henry IV pt 2

Shakespeare - Othello

Shakespeare - Hamlet

Shakespeare - The Tempest

Ben Johnson - Volpone

Pascal - Pensees

Racine - Phaedra

Blake - Marriage of Heaven & Hell

Goethe - Faust

Kierkegaard - Fear & Trembling

Baudelaire - Journals

Ibsen - Peer Gynt

Dostoevsky - Brothers Karamzov

Rimbaud - Une Saison en Enfer

Henry Adams - The Education of Henry Adams

Melville - Moby Dick

Rilke - Journal of my Other Self

Kafka - The Castle

TS Elliot - Family Reunion

All that and 9 Opera Libretti.

And thus my Auden Project.

With today's news that Iain Banks has terminal cancer, I had to fly to John C. Wright's page to discover where I might ever find his like, or at least those authors that the Cool Kids know which will get me by rights to participate in the Long Talk. So as we speak I am downloading somebody named Gene Wolfe, who apparently has a universe, and we begin with the Shadow of the Torturer. So this may be a light side trip, or maybe even a detour. We shall see.

April 02, 2013

I'm about to spread the meme around with a conservative and libertarian stamp of approval. Since the idea is expressed in terms of expresso, I expect that even Liberals and especially Progressives will instantly understand it. What they may not understand is why conservatives and libertarians would support such a scheme. The answer is simple, it cuts out the middleman of government & the compulsion of law and instead uses unregulated markets and the goodness of people's hearts. You know, rather like Instagram, Twitter and Facebook are unregulated markets, or did you forget that?

"We enter a little coffeehouse with a friend of mine and give our order. While we’re approaching our table two people come in and they go to the counter:‘Five coffees, please. Two of them for us and three suspended’ They pay for their order, take the two and leave.

I ask my friend: “What are those ‘suspended’ coffees?”My friend: “Wait for it and you will see.”

Some more people enter. Two girls ask for one coffee each, pay and go. The next order was for seven coffees and it was made by three lawyers - three for them and four ‘suspended’. While I still wonder what’s the deal with those ‘suspended’ coffees I enjoy the sunny weather and the beautiful view towards the square in front of the café. Suddenly a man dressed in shabby clothes who looks like a beggar comes in through the door and kindly asks‘Do you have a suspended coffee ?’

It’s simple - people pay in advance for a coffee meant for someone who can not afford a warm beverage. The tradition with the suspended coffees started in Naples, but it has spread all over the world and in some places you can order not only a suspended coffee, but also a sandwich or a whole meal.

The solution is ideal. It gives the person donating the money complete control. If they have the confidence in the business that the goods and services will be delivered to those in need, that is the full level of trust required.

April 01, 2013

I have determined that my liberal arts education is complete. It took too long, and I wasted too much time on it. But at least I have gotten to the part at which the appeals to to those pop and middlebrow entertainments that are the vast legacy of mass communications fail to inspire me. I am resolved, for the most part, to the high arts and they give me genuine pleasure. It took a surprisingly long time.

I'm not even sure that I was aware that I was in that pursuit. I was scooting along via inertia and aversion. The 'Noble Arena' I began seeking back at State, was more of an escape from Midnight Star in hopes that hiphop would get better, than anything more than a isolated fondness for Liszt and Debussy. It took me years to find the kind of industrial hiphop I truly loved as I suffered through Finitribe, Bad Brains, Barmy Army, and Skinny Puppy. It took me a decade to get past the Granta school of literature. It took me a very long time to settle on the sort of fashion I wish to use to convey my civilization in unspoken ways. All of this continues to evolve, but without the sense of urgency that kept telling me that I still didn't get it. I get it now. My Liberal Arts eduction is settled. I understand what to do with my frustrations when what is commonly out there insults my intelligence. Also importantly, I know what and what not to expect from a deep dive into Epictetus or Sophocles. I can appreciate trees as well as forest.

So now what I am missing is a Martial Education.

In parallel, all of my life I have thought at length about the fact that I did not have to go to Vietnam. And in my first full-time job I spent a lot of time with Vietnam vets. I remember how counter-intuitive it seemed to me that they were so level headed, honest and mellow as compared to that nacscent gangsta culture that marked the knuckleheads in my old neighborhood engaging the drug trade. But who was more deadly was never in question.

There were times I flirted with the idea of ROTC, but never quite seriously. I very much would have liked to have gone to the Coast Guart Academy, but I was a lousy long distance swimmer and I didn't want to cut my hair. The idea of overcoming such obstacles was not something I placed a lot of stock in. There have been three or four times in my life I was determined to take my body image into my own hands and each was only a partial success. I've always routed around the failure. I'm tough and scrappy. I never really wanted to be.. well it's more honest to say that I long, long ago gave up on being tall, heroic and commanding. I've never even slam dunked on a 9 foot hoop, nor bench pressed more than 180. I spent all of high school shorter than 5' 7" and under 150 pounds. I've always had an indomitable spirit, admittedly to the point of what was always interpreted as arrogance. But it was the sort of arrogance one does not assume of bigger, taller men. In them it's called 'natural leadership'. In my last days before fatherhood, embarked on my penultimate physical fitness project. It was called the 'huge project' in which my aim was to make myself look an order of magnitude more pugnacious and swaggery. I suppose exactly like LL Cool J without the tatoos.

I started eating like a pig, and I really haven't stopped since 1993, roughly 50 pounds ago. I had a short hiatus in '03 with a literal poverty diet and dropped down to 185 via cardio-kickboxing and unemployment. But all the flab is back, on top of my sturdy frame. And quite frankly it's all belly. From a rear view, I still look athletic, but the side view is an abomination. I need to crank off four inches of waist. The odd thing is that until about a year ago, I had a certain amount of confidence that one crash program, maybe six weeks of unemployment, was all I needed to get right back to where I was in '93. Now I realize what foolishness that is. I still had a decent beach volleyball game, but that was all skill and not athleticism.

I'm joing the geriatric gym this week. But that's only part of the story - what I'm really after is the martial mindset. What I'm coming to realize like a boot to the head that what I've been thinking about the martial world is all just theory, fiction and video games. OK that's a kind of triple redundant statement - but it has not been about getting in and kicking any physical ass. And so having purchased in my fever, some EDC and tactical folding blades, and taking shooting quite seriously, it has become quite plain to me that I need to just get out there and do. I have tools, but having the tools is meaningless. It's worse than meaningless, it's foolishness.

I don't expect that mastery will come soon or simply, but I know that competence will. And that amounts to putting in something every day. And so I've begun to stretch - without the preconceived notion that I'm going to get over some magic bubble and suddenly become what I once was, only smarter. This is to a new body. A new beginning. Because it's necessary. I am no longer satisfied with the comeraderie of first responders. It has got to be me.